<< 1 >>
Rating: 
Summary: Perversely pleasurable for a while.
Review: Although MALDOROR's most immediate pleasure is its naked nastiness - rape, murder, torture, paedophilia, bestiality, blasphemy etc. - the truly unsettling nature of the book is its textual instability, the violence of its language, the horrible, concrete, surgical beauty of its images, the haunting effect of its descriptions, its foregrounding and destabilising of slowly compelling narrative, its clashing of tones, moods, viewpoints, narrators, targets, sympathies. French literature produces a lot of books like this, wherein a madman shouts the reader out of his complacency (e.g. Rimbaud, Corbiere, the Gide of FRUITS OF THE EARTH). This is better than most because its disgust is funny and a thrill. After book three, though, it all becomes a little wearing and monotonous, as Lautreamont's assault is more tediously preoccupied with language. The same fault can be levelled at the underrated, protean, difficult POEMS, where intellectual engagement wins out over sensual overspill. Book Six of MALDOROR, though, is a masterpiece of narrative subversion, simultaneously asserting the power of stories and running riot through their conventions, looking forward to, amongst others, Borges and Nabokov. Knight's introduction is rewarding, if a little dated, but the translation is one of the best I've ever read, capturing Maldoror's rhythmic logorrhea to horrible perfection.
Rating: 
Summary: Not the best translation
Review: I must say I do prefer the Lykiard translation to this one. Check it out.
Rating:
Summary: Not the best translation
Review: I must say I do prefer the Lykiard translation to this one. Check it out.
Rating:
Summary: What hit me?
Review: If reading a normal horror novel (a term which I really dislike) is like watching a car crash, this evil, sick, tasteless and brilliant book is like being in one. Sensitive types should be warned that it contains lashings of blasphemy, weird sex (including, in one eye-popping instance, sex with a shark), bloody murder and rape, and all manner of thoroughly awful things. At which point I suspect you've all fallen asleep. Don't. What separates this from the supposed 'shock' lit of, say, Irvine Welsh, is a delirious sense of invention. More in tune with Michael Moore or Chris Morris than Howard Stern, each revolted gasp from the reader is carefully placed and planned to provoke a deep-seated feeling of terror. What always needles me is the way that the book's Satanic protagonist Maldoror often switches places with the narrator. It's a full-frontal assault on the reader's security. And why do we read it? Because it makes every other supposedly shocking novel seem tame, unadventurous and laboured. Even American Psycho. Especially American Psycho. Rather than a plot, Lautreamont has chosen a selection of essays and incidents to show Maldoror's evil. His concern over whether or not to kill a child is one of the many freakish and distressing incidents ("...lest your body burst like an over-ripe fruit"), but it is all shot through with black humour and a surprisingly moral indignation. In fact, Lautreamont offered to 'tone it down' for its first publication. Thank God he didn't. "You have no idea how hard it is", as Maldoror would say.
<< 1 >>
|
